TRADITIONAL, NOT CONVENTIONAL.

Stupid Weight Watchers' Magazine Article (March 4, 2014)

And while I am on the subject of the media, I would like to mention that there is a particularly offensive news squib in the March/April issue of Weight Watchers Magazine that sneers at the use of spinal manipulation for back pain. We've been seeing many fewer of those types of articles in recent years because of increasing scientific proof of the efficacy of spinal manipulation. But what really floors me about this particular article is that the very limited information it chose to present in support of its assertion is false.

Briefly, the piece declares that an independent analysis from a very respected group of scientists (the Cochrane Collaboration) did not find enough research supporting the use of spinal manipulation for back pain for manipulation to be considered as a "standard treatment" for back pain. (Overlooking the fact that manipulation has been a standard treatment for back pain for many years now, of course.) Whereas in reality, Cochrane's analysis has found most treatments for back pain to be worthless and spinal manipulation to be the only even potentially effective treatment for acute lower back pain. Weight Watchers' author has to have deliberately misrepresented this information.

The Cochrane Collaboration is an independent, international group that analyzes evidence for medical treatments in an effort to discover which ones show actual evidence of benefit and which don't. Most people do not realize just how few treatments -- even in conventional medicine -- have been proven to do what they are meant to do. Evidence-based medicine is something that is long overdue and the Cochrane Collaboration is currently a big part of that. Expect to see more mention of them in the future, hopefully with more accuracy than in this case.